Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

The movie screen was currently showing the same scenes broadcast to the audience in the stadium and various others from the eyes of Mike, Monique, and the other chosen. If one wasn't used to the typical dungeon streams of the dungeon god, one could have mistaken it for the real thing.

Except there was one difference, this dungeon was more brutal and cutthroat. Not about how endangered the actual life of attacking parties, or the pure gore of it. There was very little of this here. It was the way it absolutely abused the contestants for content and entertainment.

This dungeon portrayed the kind of cold, calculated cruelty that aimed for the maximum number of audience and views while disregarding any human dignity of the participants. At no point did it really risk the lives of the runners, but it was unlikely that they would ever regain their dignity after the humiliations they had suffered in the dark halls, planned by twisted minds, nourished in the depths of television, and the internet.

What all this culminated into was a simple and hurtful truth. This dungeon was far more entertaining to the gods than most of those under the Dungeon God. Beasts aiming for blood sport and domination simply couldn't compete with a civilization that had cultivated entertainment to the peak and knew the dark desires of the sentient mind.

“Now you regret denying him those dungeon rights, right?” Hermes mocked him, reminding the dungeon god of his petty act when he denied Seth, or his creation to become dungeon masters because of his bet with the System God.

Apart from the concept, the kind of traps and hurdles Minas Mar's dungeon architects used were very new to the gods, which made them even more interesting. Using polished and lubricated trunks the challengers had to walk across, randomly falling platforms or badly balanced pillars over pits of viscous goo that kept them like quicksand. Sticky pendulums and pistons equipped with the same glue.

All that on traditional traps like rotating blades, poison darts, monster houses... Especially the riddle rooms were intriguing as they mixed various riddles and puzzles that all needed to be solved before the participants were able to escape, given they were not strong enough to break through by force.

Unlike the usual dungeons, this one was not nearly indestructible. Although very few of the players and demons had the idea of using brute force because they had internalized that dungeons were indestructible, the cultivators were not as inhibited. Which didn't mean brute force always worked.

Quite often, one could hear the audience in the stadium laugh uproariously, when someone broke through a wall or a locked door, only to suddenly face a flood of viscous goo or a giant ball directly eliminating them from the race. Even the gods often laughed and chuckled, especially when someone was caught by a sticky piston and repeatedly smashed into the opposite wall.

Although quite a few of these methods didn't threaten their lives, it often led to their disqualification. After all, once their body cam was broken and their personal golem was lost, they were disqualified. This made the timing on time obstacles like pitons, spinning blades, or magic traps like lighting and firewalls a very tricky obstacle for many of them.

The ingenuity and variety of traps and obstacles had many of the gods giggling in glee and excitement. Had the dungeon god not been so stubborn, this could have been his film set. The amount of divine power he could have gotten by marketing this...

Instead, he had to sit in someone else's show and watch the potential fortune run through his sacred fingers. He could feel the space in the back expanding, as more and more avatars entered the cinema dimension of Hades, Seth, and Hephaestus.

Meanwhile, the System God beside him stayed suspiciously quiet. Why wasn't he the one gloating? Looking closer, was he...shaking?

“hey...”

“Puha! D-Don't talk to me, I'm already having a hard time keeping it in!” the star-studded robe laughed out.

“Ugh, this is your fault!” the dungeon god vented, aggravated by the rampant laughter.

“Haha, it's not my fault you did something useless,” the chuckling god answered, shrugging his shoulders.

...

--- Dungeon Route---

Hua Ying heard a dissonant squeal just before a spike of black ice flitted by his left ear, barely missing the golem eye hovering behind him. He had been walking for a while and his vigilance had dropped, almost leading to the loss of his golem.

His Qi Sense expanded and caught onto a figure standing far down the corridor. Surprised, he realized that he knew her and realized what the previous noise reminded of. The demon girl with a flute, he vividly remembered his abhorrence and fascination with their terrible music.

How could something so abysmal hold such strange powers? it just didn't make sense to him, driving him crazy at the time. but who would have thought he would face a fellow flutist in this dark underground passage?

“I'm Ember, and I will play you the song of the Last Smoke!” the demon shouted some gibberish, as Hao Ying had already placed his flute on his lips. He was a cultivator, she was a demon, and neither had the benefits of players like auto-translation. While the audience understood or got a translation, the flutist had no idea what she said.

A clear, lovely melody filled the corridors as he started to play. A silken calm sound that enveloped the listener like a soft blanket. The peace was deceptive as he started to weave his martial techniques into the soundscape. There were many who had underestimated his arts and found eternal peace in his music.

However, he could feel it. The heat, the chaos, the systematic deconstruction of his soundscape. The finely woven net of martial power was ripped by the fast-paced and erratic play of the demoness. At the edge of his perception, she was dancing in reckless abandon, playing like a maniac as fire and smoke surrounded her like a storm.

The darkness of the corridor was broken by red lightning and the glow of dark embers. hao Ying quickened his pace to compete with the demon's cacophony, but the disruption was hard to overcome. Since he could not finish his technique, they were at a standstill.

This was until the play at the end of the corridor became even faster. it was like the demon had lost her mind and the music she played became louder and louder to ear-deafening heights. The tornado of smoke and flame broke apart, filling the whole tunnel.

Her music had come to an end, but danger just began. Shocked, the cultivator noticed that something moved in the darkness. A beast of fire and smoke without clear shape or form came rushing at him! Had he played too deep and greedily, disregarding the danger the demon had posed?

“Tsk, how unrefined...” he complained, not about the opponent's attack, but about what he was forced to do, as he stopped playing the flute. At no point had he lost his calm, facing the creature rushing at him, relying on his Qi sense, he wielded the flute like a staff.

At this moment, a shard of black ice hidden in the smoke flew past him and shot down his golem! He did not have the time to react and block it, forcing him to lose one of his two cameras. Aggravated he swung his flute.

His Qi and the air flowing through the flute created a terrifying rupturing sound, the same power that had eliminated so many participants early on in the race. The smoke beast had no physical form, so a physical attack would have been meaningless, but the Qi-filled sound attack easily ripped apart the immaterial foe into shreds of ember and wisps of smoke.

The easy win couldn't lessen the grief he felt. Not only had he lost the golem's eye, but the demoness had already escaped... This encounter was his complete loss.